Hot! – London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform
Posted on 04. Jul, 2009 by Amit Jindal in Business, Hardware, Linux, Open Source, Security, Servers, Windows
When massive infrastructure relies on non-linux/non-unix, this should be expected. Although windows is good for quick upstart, major infrastructure simply cannot rely on it.
Here’s what computerworld wrote:
Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE London Stock Exchange’s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect’s fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.
TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times, real-time system speeds, for stock trades.
It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE’s competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don’t count. The answer is Linux.
It’s not often that you see a major company dump its infrastructure software the way the LSE is about to do. But, then, it’s not often you see enterprise software fail quite so badly and publicly as was the case with the LSE. I can only wonder how many other Windows enterprise software failures are kept hidden away within IT departments by companies unwilling to reveal just how foolish their decisions to rely on archaic, cranky Windows software solutions have proven to be.
via London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform – Computerworld Blogs.
Need we say more? This week we are releasing the Aquevix Small Business Server that can easily claim to be all IT for a small business boxed in a single server. It is based on CentOS linux, one of the most powerful linux server available on planet. CentOS is itself based on Redhat Enterprise Server so no surprises there.
Read more about Aquevix SBS at http://www.aquevix.com/sbs
Anyway, this was fun. Too bad LSE didn’t use common sense and relied on Microsoft marketing machine to build their enterprise.